[Reader-list] Media Representations of 13 December

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

please find below a longish posting (apologies for length in advance, 
and for cross posting on the Reader List and Commons Law) occasioned by 
the Supreme Court verdict on the 13th December ('Parliament Attack') 
case. The post tries specifically to look at the twists and turns in the 
media representations of the 13th December case. I look forward to 
criticisms, comments, discussion and reflections.

regards

Shuddha
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Media Trials and Courtroom Tribulations : A Battle of Images, Words and 
Shadows

Preliminary Notes Towards an Enquiry into the Conduct of the Media with 
Regard to the Trial of the Accused in the '13th December : Attack on 
Parliament' Case - 2001 - 2005

Shuddhabrata Sengupta

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The acquital of an innocent man is not an occasion for celebration, but 
a cause for reflection."

Syed Abdul Rehman Gilani, on his being acquitted by the Supreme Court on 
charges of conspiracy in the "13th December, 2001 : Attack on 
Parliament" Case. August, 4, 2005
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the 4th of August, 2005 (yesterday) the Supreme Court of India gave 
its verdict on the 13th December, 2001 'Attack on Parliament' Case, 
acquitting two of the original accused, SAR Geelani, lecturer in Arabic 
at Zakir Husain College, Delhi and Afshan Guru (aka Navjot Sidhu) wife 
of one of the accused Shaukat Husain Guru, and upholding the death 
sentence pronounced by the Delhi High Court and the Special POTA court 
on Mohammad Afzal. The High Court's pronouncement of a death sentence on 
Shaukat Husain Guru was commuted to 10 years imprisonment.
In announcing this verdict, the Supreme Court of India upheld the Delhi 
High Court's acquital of SAR Geelani and Afshan Guru. Geelani had been 
sentenced to death, and Afshan Guru awarded five years of rigorous 
imprisonment by the judge of the special POTA court, S.N. Dhingra on the 
18th of December, 2002.

The Justices P.V. Reddy and P.P. Naolekar, while acquitting SAR Geelani 
on the grounds that the prosecution was not able to present adequate 
evidence against the accused, maintained that there was still a 'needle 
of suspicion' against SAR Geelani, but that suspicion alone could not 
form the basis of a sentence in the absence of robust evidence.

With the pronouncement of this verdict by the highest judicial authority 
of the Republic of India, a sordid chapter in the history of this 
republic has come to a provisional and uncertain conclusion. One 
hesitates to use the term 'end' because the unpredictable nature of 
events as they unfold, perhaps in the immediate future, perhaps due to a 
random discovery in the archives many decades hence, may yet deliver us 
another 'turn' in the unravelling of this story which might still give 
cause to startle us all.

Or it might not, and as in what befalls many unexplained twists and 
turns in the script of our times. we may learn to become inured to the 
tug of an uncomfortable and persistent memory of things and people that 
went amiss. Like the 'out-takes' in footage that never quite made it 
into a film, about which we can say that we have a memory of being 
present as witnesses at the shooting, but little or no recall of ever 
having seen them on screen, like papers, documents, transcripts, bodies 
and memories that turn to dust and are scattered - the history of the 
attack on the Parliament of India too will in all likelihood become a 
hazy recollection with only the words and images of 'terrorists' and 
'martyrs' and 'threat to national security' thrown up in bold relief, 
and with all else obscured within a labyrinth of shadows.

Some people call this forgetting, others call it history. The history of 
the Republic of India could fill an archive of lost memories. Perhaps 
there needs to be, somewhere near India Gate, not far from the present 
'National Archives' and the Parliament, a site earmarked for a building 
to house a 'National Archive of Forgetting'. A building - part Lutyens, 
part Le Corbusier, part Raj Rewal, part Kafka and part Borges, that in 
its architectural imagination would do true justice to the delicate 
combination of pomp, paranoia and amnesia that buttresses the 
foundations of the republic.

While there may be widespread relief in the knowledge that SAR Geelani 
and Afshan Guru are now acquitted (if not unconditionally exonerated) by 
the judicial apparatus, the turn of events does not give anyone any 
cause for celebration. Neither the Delhi Police and the prosecution, who 
have seen their arguments fall like so many dead birds from the judicial 
sky. Those who have stood by Geelani and sought to defend him can breath 
easier, and pause at the end of the maelstorm that has occupied their 
sleeping and waking hours, but their is little cause to rejoice. The 
court has maintained that there is a 'needle of suspicion' even as it 
has not been able to show any evidence to substantiate this charge. We 
need to ask how this 'needle of suspicion' got created, and why it 
continues to persist, quivering in the minds of the judges even as they 
comb swathes of missing and faulty and forged evidence. As Geelani 
himself said in a press conference immediately after the pronouncement 
of the verdict, the "The acquital of an innocent man is not an occasion 
for celebration, but a cause for reflection." Why, after all did the 
police and concerned security agencies, and large sections of the 
'independent' media have to go to such lengths to frame a man against 
whom they could not provide a shred of quality evidence in the special 
POTA court, in the High Court, and in the Supreme Court? Now that at 
least two of the accused can walk free, and one other can live (albeit 
in prison) we need to begin to ask what really happenned. Some others 
may have to do whatever is necessary and permissible under the law to 
ensure that Shaukat Husain too is able to to leave prison sooner and 
that Mohammad Afzal does not take the final walk to the gallows.

The doubts about the circumstances that led to the attack on the Indian 
parliament will persist as long as the primary actors in the case do not 
reveal, or are not compelled to reveal, through the process of an 
independent and impartial inquiry the roles that they have played. A 
committee to demand precisely such an inquiry has indeed been 
constituted by a group of citizens, but as of now, no agency of the 
state, or civil society, and no voices of substance in the media have 
either endorsed or echoed their demand.

If Mohammad Afzal is indeed executed, then some of the truths that he 
alone (barring some of his handlers and interrogators) has access to, 
will follow him to his grave.In the event that the spin doctors of the 
media continue to play the role that they have played so honorably in 
the duration of this entire set of trials, it is unlikely that anything 
approximating the truth will ever be made available to the public in 
India, or indeed, anywhere in the world. The gentlemen and women of the 
fourth estate, the shining knights of the free press and electronic 
media of India will once again have demonstrated their willingness to 
construct an elaborate machine made out of smoke and mirrors that does 
more to conceal than to reveal. For an alternative version of the events 
to eventually emerge, it is crucial that Mohammad Afzal's death sentence 
be challenged, and that SAR Geelani (on whose life there have been two 
extra-judicial attempts, once while he was in prison, and again outside 
his advocate Nandita Haksar's residence by an as yet unidentified 
assailant in February this year). Both Geelani and Afzal need to live if 
we are to get any closer to the truth of what happenned on the 13th of 
December 2001, and why Geelani was framed. It is vital to understand 
that the 'climate of suspicion' that has led to Afzal's conviction, and 
to the Supreme Court's unwarranted remark that a 'needle of suspicion' 
still points at Geelani are a product of more than four years of 
consistent information management and the production of images. Judges, 
like the rest of us, are as likely to be swayed by these images and 
processed bodies of information in the media, and we need to be sharply 
aware at least of the fact that the management and processing of 
information is a key element in the realpolitik of 'terrorism and 
counter-terrorism' before we jump to any conclusions about appotioning 
guilt and innocence. My hunch is that the criticial media literacy of 
the highest judiciary of the Republic of India is not so immaculate at 
the present as to render it immune to prejudice.The role played by the 
production of moving images, in film and video, in cinema and on 
television is particularly pertinent here, and I will attend to this in 
some greater detail later in this essay.

As of now, barring a presidential pardon, or the unlikely re-opening of 
the case, Afzal will hang. One hopes, for all our sakes, that it is 
otherwise, and that the circumstances that led to the alleged 
'terrorist' attack on the parliament of what is sometimes loosely called 
the 'largest democracy in the world' , to the passing of the most 
draconian preventive detention law by the legislature of the same 
'largest democracy' - (the thankfully now repealed POTA,) and the 
situation of near war that lasted for more than a year between two 
nuclear weapons states who are also neighbours, will one day become 
available in the public domain. Until then, the delicate combination of 
secrecy and hyperbole, of understatement and exaggeration, of straight 
lies and half cooked truths, of skullduggery and sentimentality, will 
continue to taint the history of communication practices in our republic 
of forgotten truths and remembered illusions, where (as elsewhere), the 
'media', the 'television and film industries' and the 'intelligence 
community' dance an elegant tango in which it sometimes becomes 
difficult to discern who leads who on the dance floor.

This text is only a call for a sustained meditation on this condition. 
And an attempt, to account for and ask some questions about the 
overproduction of images and the aporiae within them that surround the 
representations of what is called 'terrorism', the events of the 13th of 
December,and the trials that followed. I do not pretend to give a 
comprehensive account of what happenned, because I do not possess the 
necessary critical forensic-legal apparatus by way of training, nor am I 
an expert media 'analyst'. I am a media practitioner, and I write this 
from the standpoint of someone who practices media and who observes what 
others practice. I do hope however, that reading this might prompt those 
who have the necessary legal-forensic apparatus, or who may lay claim to 
being expert media analysts, to ask some hard questions on the role that 
the media have played in this case, and with regard to the 
respresentation of 'terrorism and counter-terrorism' in general, and 
provoke some reason for introspection within the community of media 
practitioners.

A thorough enqiry into these matters will make it necessary for us to 
examine a whole range of materials - charge-sheets, court records, 
depositions, defence and prosecution arguments, judgements as well as 
news reports, television news and current affairs programmes, televised 
enactments or dramatizations and feature length fiction films.

This text is a culled from preliminary notes towards such an excercise, 
but even in making these notes I have become aware of the fact that the 
task of reflection on the media requires us to consider media materials, 
not as isolates, but as elements in a networked reality. Where cinema, 
television, newspaper reportage and even public service messages enter 
into elaborate interweaving feedback loops that re-inforce and sustain 
each other, either through direct quotation, or through narrative 
'enhancements' that create a situation where each message enhances its 
claim to credibility by relying on the credentials of the other. Thus, 
when hearing a voice say authoritatively on a televised commentary 
accompanying a visual of a slain man's visage that the face belongs to a 
'terrorist' we are implicitly being asked to invoke 'images' of 
terrorists faces that we may have seen in fiction film. Conversely, when 
a fiction film consciously evokes the aesthetic register of the rough 
hewn 'documentary' look and feel of news reportage when invoking 
terrorism, it is doing so in order to buttress its own claim to 
credibility. Events and processes such as the 'reading' of 13th December 
and its aftermath take place at the intersections of a densely networked 
media space, where messages, memories, events, and mediums relay and 
overlay each other. These realities make the task of sophisticated and 
sensitive readings of media, not an academic excercise but an urgent 
political task, that has bearings not only on the destinies of our 
polity but also, as in the 13th December case, on the life and death of 
individuals. The galling neglect, incapacity or unwilllingess, on the 
part of a vast majority of media scholars and critics in India to 
undertake this excercise, and the lax ethical standards of many media 
practitioners has in the final analysis to be read against what happens 
to us as a polity, and what happens to the lives of individuals and to 
those close to them.

For too long we have looked at media materials - be they film, or 
television, or print as if they exist in isolated, hermetic universes . 
This mode of analysis that sees 'cinema as cinema alone' and that does 
not take into account the networked information world inhabited and 
created by viewers, readers, audiences and producers of media materials 
through a constant process of interactive, cross referential and self 
referential iteration of media objects is totally inadequate when it 
comes to the task of understanding the place of images, sounds, words 
and information that attempt to express the contemporary realities we 
live in.

It is important to remember that on seeing the pictures of the bodies of 
the slain alleged 'terrorists' who entered the precincts of the 
Parliament building on the morning of the 13th of December, the then 
home minister, Lal Krishna Advani is said to have remarked that the 
assailants 'looked like Pakistani Terrorists'. Advani must have known 
what he was talking about (at least the part about their looking like 
'Pakistanis' ) since he looks a lot like a Pakistani himself (as do many 
north Indians and migrants to India like Advani from the provinces of 
British India that became West Pakistan in 1947). But more importantly, 
he was able to assert the fact that they looked 'like...terrorists'. It 
is important to pause and consider how exactly we know that someone 
looks like 'terrorists'. The Delhi police, which has had considerable 
experience in handling 'terrorists' and 'terrorism' over the years, has 
reminded us in a series of thoughtful public service advertisements that 
'terrorists' are suspicious because they stand out by virtue of their 
somewhat unusual appearance and behaviour (they were clothing unsuited 
to the weather etc) , and that simultaneously they are suspicious 
precisely because they blend in so easily with the general population. 
It is this combination of 'standing out' and 'blending in' at the same 
time that causes alarm. It is possible to say that one can't quite make 
out if a person 'stands out' if he/she 'blends in' at the same time. But 
to this, like Advani, we know that we can respond with certainty, 
because we feel we know that when we see a 'terrorist' we will be able 
to recognize one. After all, we have 'seen' people who convincingly 
embody 'terrorism' many times. We have seen them on identikit 
photographs pasted on to walls and street corners, we have seen their 
disfigured, hooded and blurred faces in newspaper and magazine 
photographs and television reports, and we have seen them up close, 
countless times in mainstream cinema. We have seen the face of the 
terrorist so often, and so intimately as a moving image that in a sense 
the terrorist actually lives in our own heads, and where we to ever come 
across his body, living or dead, or his image, we would be immediately 
in a position to cross check his features against the indelible impress 
of those features in our nervous system.

The production of terrorism is not something that happens sui generis. 
The production of terrorism is almost always, in every society, also a 
production of images of terror. In fact the fear that terrorism induces 
in general terms is not so much by way of the actual impact of 
explosives, gun shots and incendiary or lethal materials but by way of a 
circulation and amplification of images and their effects. We know this 
from every instance of spectacular terrorism that we have witnessed in 
the last hundred or so years. So much so that even more or less 
arbitrary calendrical notations like 9/11, 12/13 or now, more recently, 
7/7, become indexical images of terror. All we need to do is to see a 
particular alphanumeric arrangement to experience at the very least a 
twinge of the recognition of of the feeling that terror induces. If the 
production of terrorism is so interlaced with the production of images, 
we can also say that the production of certain images is also linked to 
a climate that gives credibility to the production of a certain set of 
seemingly self evident truths about terrorism. Sometimes to create the 
consequences that a terrorist incident produces it is necessary to 
create a strong body of images that will serve the necessary purposes in 
a focused way.

The tried and tested tactics of infiltration into existing terror cells 
or political groups, or the creation of such cells were none exist, or 
when those that exist are too weak to perform a spectacular act of 
terror are well documented in the extant literature on the work and 
function of intelligence agencies of various states. The MI6 's murky 
relationships to the IRA, and later, the provisional IRA, Mossad's 
successful infiltration of the Palestinian Abu Nidal group, and the 
Italian and Belgian intelligence agencies dealings with the mafia, 
ex-nazis, far right militias, fascists and secret societies in setting 
off a chain of spectacular terrorists incidents in the 1980s (including 
the Bologna train station bombing of 1974 and 1980 that killed 113 
people and wounded 180) that could later be attributed to 'left wing' 
terrorists is very well documented, as is the history of the 
infiltration of the 'naxalite' movement in India in the 1970s by Indian 
intelligence bureau and special police operatives. The picture of a 
shadowy dalliance between 'terrorism' and' counter-terrorism', between 
'militants' and 'surrendered miltiants', between people in and out of 
different kinds of uniform is also beginning to emerge from the 
battlegrounds of Kashmir, Assam and the North East. Miltiary 
intelligence officers, 'special task force' personnel, intelligence 
bureau operatives and a host of 'free lance' professionals occasionally 
masquerading as 'insurgents' to give effect to 'special operations' is 
freely written about in magazines like 'Force' - a journal specifically 
catering to the professional needs and realities of 'armed forces and 
security personnel' in India.

There is no reason to suppose that the tacticians and strategists of the 
'intelligence community' that owes its fealty to the Indian state do not 
from time to time have to consider it necessary to 'create' or 
manufacture instances of terrorism, when it suits the purposes of the 
state to do so. This is standard practice worldwide, especially under 
the conditions of the 'global war against terror', and there is no 
reason to suppose that Indian intelligence professionals are anything 
but abreast of key global trends in this regard.

This 'creation' of terrorism is something that generally requires a 
calibrated media strategy and information management such that the 
bodies and actions that characterize a particular operation can be 
'rendered' in a manner that is convincing and useful. The overproduction 
of enthusiastic and detailed reports on the supposed backgrounds, past 
lives and actions of the primary accused in the 13th December case bear 
an overwhelming stamp of such a close alignment between the need to 
create a body of convincing 'evidence' on the part of the security and 
intelligence community and the media's thirst for a meaty story. 
Television channels and newspapers routinely projected the accused and 
arrested as 'terrorist masterminds and co-conspirators' without even the 
caveat that this was as alleged by their captors.

The enthusiastic reportage of the 'arrest' of the prime accused Afzal, 
Shaukat Husain and Geelani, which in some instances bordered on the 
hysterical, particularly in the week following the 14th of December, 
(when Geelani was detained under POTO) is particularly noteworthy. In 
the stories that began to make their appearance, the swoops were a 
result of the brilliant investigations carried out by the police on the 
mobile phone records of the phones and sim cards found on the bodies of 
the alleged slain terrorists. Not one newspaper or television channel 
paused to ask why a group of terrorists going on what could clearly be a 
'suicide mission' or one in which the chances of their being captured 
was very high, should carry identity cards, diaries detailing their 
actions and plans and mobile phones that could be made to yield entire 
directories of their contacts. No one paused to ask what can only be 
very reasonable questions about the veracity and provenance of these 
records and documents, nor were any questions raised about the absence 
of stringent forensic procedures and criteria pertaining to the recovery 
of data from these documents. Court records show that the phone records 
relevant to the conversations between Afshan Guru and Shaukat or to 
certain conversations that Geelani is said to have had that were 
produced by the police as evidence (after much dithering) are actually 
of the days 'after' they were detained. Not a single newspaper or 
television news programme in those days, or in the early days of the 
trial in the special POTA court could exhibit the necessary degree of 
reticence or patience required in the handling of a case as sensitive as 
this one. If the investigating authorities or the prosecution, or the 
police said that phone records said something, no one actually asked to 
see the phone records, or to examine the dates, let alone the content of 
what transpired. The fact that the death sentences handed out by the 
POTA court were on the basis of false, forged, or inadmissible or absent 
evidence was not remarked upon by any news channel. A notable exception 
however, which should not go unremarked is the reportage of the case in 
the Hindu, which, barring a stray story in the early days, was marked by 
balanced and faired reporting, especially the reports filed from the 
court by Anjali Mody and which even subjected other media reports of the 
case to some degree of critical scrutiny

Finally, when the defence asked for the phone records to be produced and 
examined by independent and knowledgable witnesses, what came to light 
were discrepancies in translation and transcription. The fact that the 
translated sentence 'It becomes necessary sometimes' ('yeh kabhi kabhi 
zaroori hota hai'), apparently said in response to a question about 
'what has happenned in Delhi' , which Geelani said referred to a 
domestic dispute and which the prosecution claimed was about the attack 
on parliament, and on which hinged the entire structure of the case 
against SAR Geelani was not found to be audible in the tape of the phone 
intercept when it was played repeatedly for the benefit of the two 
indpendent defence witnesses - a documentary fillmmaker, Sanjay Kak and 
a trade union activist, Sampath Prakash, both native Kashmiri speakers.

It needs to be mentioned that while the media attention on SAR Geelani, 
as the 'intellectual preceptor' of the terrorists was particularly 
intense, it was less so with regard to Mohammad Afzal, the man whose 
'confession' in detention, an instrument inadmissible in ordinary law as 
evidence (although permitted in POTA) escaped much by way of scrutiny. 
The media nailed Geelani on the basis of this confession.

But the media did more. Newspapers detailed property Geelani is said to 
have amassed as rewards for his labours, as well as the minutiae of his 
contacts with a student of 'west asian' origin who must have been an 
'arab terrorist'. But no newspaper or television channel ever mentioned, 
that Afzal identified as a former JKLF militant and fruit merchant, was 
in fact a 'surrendered miltiant' and that he had for seven years been 
harrassed by, and on occasion worked for, the 'Special Task Force' a 
shadowy counter-terrorism outfit that operates with impunity in Kashmir. 
The fact remains that in his statement to the court Afzal said 
unequivocally that he met one Tariq, a trusted lieutenant of the 
arch-terrorist 'Ghazi Baba' who is said to have motivated him to return 
to the ways of the 'jihad for azaadi' in an STF training camp in Dral in 
South Kashmir, and his wife's statement that Afzal was instructed to 
bring two of the men later identified as the 'slain terrorists' in the 
Parliament Attack to Delhi and provide them with shelter while they were 
in 'transit' by none other than his STF handlers, went unremarked, with 
one significant exception, to which we will refer later.

It is interesting to speculate as to how some stories made their way 
into the media, and how some stories remained virtually 'out of bounds' 
even if they made their appearance sometimes in court documents. It is 
also interesting to consider whether this pattern of ommission and 
insertion or fabrication pointed to the collaborative authorship 
(between the police, the intellgience community, and the media 
professionals and channels/newspapers) of these media materials . It is 
still not clear as to where the origins of these stories lay, and why 
they appeared so frequently, and why they were given so much space. One 
thing is certain, the efficient public relations and media excercises 
carried out (whether through fear or favour, or simply, access) by the 
'Special Cell' of the Delhi Police in order to make the journalists 
community simply re-produce what was fed to them in routine press 
briefings seems to have worked well. The operation worked particularly 
well with television, with several channels broadcasting 'exclusive' 
interviews with what seemed to be an affable and loqacious prime accused 
Mohammad Afzal on the 20th of December.

If media professionals highlighted elements from Afzal's first 
'confessions' in custody to substantiate their allegations against 
Geelani, they also obscured the fact that later, during the filming of 
the 'broadcast confession' of 18th December, Afzal explicitly denied the 
fact that Geelani had anything to do with the conspiracy. It was only 
when footage from this 'interview' was reproduced in a special Aaj Tak 
('100 Days after the Attack') programme that it came to light that Afzal 
had actually explicitly exonerated Geelani. When SAR Geelani's defence 
lawyers called upon the Aaj Tak reporter who took that interview, Shams 
Tahir Khan as a witness, it became clear from his deposition that 
journalists had in fact been instructed, indeed threatened, by the much 
decorated Delhi Police 'Special Cell' officer and 'Encounter' 
specialist, ACP Rajbir Singh that airing the latter part of Afzal's 
'confession' would invite dire consequences on any journalist present 
who chose to do so.

These developments did not deter Zee News, one of the most zealous extra 
judicial prosecutors of the 13th december case from producing an 
extensive 'docu-drama' on 13th December which it aired on more than one 
occasion, even as the tgrial progressed including in the countdown to 
the final hearings in the special courts.

This television programme has an interesting and chequered history. Its 
premiere screening too place in the august presence of the then home 
minister and dead Pakistani identification expert, L.K. Advani. Advani 
praised the film as an excellent example of investigative journalism and 
in fact even compared it to favourably to a subsequent Zee TV expose (on 
the attack on 'Akshardham' in Gujarat) saying that the former was much 
more meticulous and thoroughly produced. The film, which relayed and 
re-presented news, was itself news on the Zee News Channel, and its 
making was featured as a lead story on the Zee News network. The film, 
with a stentorian commentary by the Bollywood 'B' Movie Star Raza Murad, 
featured a troupe of actors, enacting the 'conspiracy'. The script of 
this television programme, as stated in a text insert at the begining of 
the programme is based on the charge-sheet of the Delhi Police in the 
case. What is particularly interesting are the many parallels, both in 
plot, mise-en-scene and narrative detail between the charge sheet, the 
Zee TV film and the Shahrukh Khan-Manisha Koirala starring film by Mani 
Ratnam - 'Dil Se'. We see the same procedures - procurement and 
manufacture of identity cards, the reconnaissance of the landmarks of 
Lutyens Delhi on winter days, the listening to hindi film music as 
terrorists work (on Radio in the film, downloaded from computers in the 
TV programme) the hint of romance, the presence of a hard line 
intellectual ideologue, the same locale - the alleyways of Old Delhi, 
around Karim's and the same method of masquerade as security 'personnel' 
. There is an uncanny similarity between the plots, almost as if the 
'terrorists', the police investigators, and the producers of the 
docu-drama had seen the film together and discussed its merits in a film 
analysis class before going their separate ways to give form and shape 
to their different agendas. Or, could it be, that the police genre of 
literature and filmmaking, which often shapes the trajectories of 
alleged 'terrorist' incidents, found in 'Dil Se - 13 December' a 
suitable vehicle for the execution of one of their most complex plots 
till date? We will never know whether or not this is indeed the case, 
until some of the key actors in this 'film' decide to speak. But it is 
self evident that a private news network gaining access to the highest 
echelons of the home ministry in order to be able to re-enact and shoot 
on the grounds of the Parliament, with the extensive operational 
co-operational of police and security personnel points to a close 
embrace between the security appraratus and a media agency. And just as 
the justices of the Supreme Court may well have their reasons to 
continue to point their 'needles of suspicions', we too will have reason 
to begin looking for, and pointing, our needles of suspicion in the 
directions that they lead us. We will need to continue to ask questions 
as to why the events of 13 December and their aftermath needed the 
extent of 'spin doctoring' that we have seen? We will have to continue 
to ask why the prosecution's case in the 13 December case had to be 
argued, not only in the court, but also on air, in living rooms, between 
commercial breaks. There are no doubts left any more about the fact that 
the arguments were flimsy and untenable. That they were bad in law, and 
that they could not be sustained under cross examination. This is 
perhaps why they had to be buttressed with so much media hype, in the 
hope that TRP ratings would work where forensic evidence may fail.

The dense tangle between film and reality in the 13 December case does 
not begin and end with 'Dil Se', there are two other films that bear 
looking at as well, (and there may well be more to come) one being '16 
December', and the other 'Khaki'. The two films have two distinct 
approaches, and are noteworthy not because I think they influenced what 
I think is the 'scripting' of 13 December, but because they are mirrors 
through which 13 December can be read. 16 December (titled so because it 
happens to be the date on which India won the 1971 war against Pakistan, 
and so is the date when in the film, a Pakistani soldier turned 
terrorist wants to unleash a nuclear attack on Delhi as an act of 
vengeance). As can be expected, the film features a dedicated bunch of 
Indian intelligence operatives (including the model turned actor Milind 
Soman who portrays a surveillance expert, with a special fondness for 
mobile phones) who foil the plot and save Delhi, India and the world 
from Nuclear Armageddon. What is interesting about 16 December is the 
way in which it 'naturalizes' surveillance technologies, (CCTV cameras, 
satellite based video surveillance, human surveillance through street 
based 'agents' who happen to be an army of blind beggars with sharp 
ears, and mobile phone interception) to produce a seamless evidentiary 
narrative. Mobile phones are high technology, the capacity to tap mobile 
phones is still higher technology and truth flows out of higher 
technology. What is even more interesting is a remarkable sequence in 
the film when the entire intelligence apparatus connives to create a 
'simulation', an image of a location in far away Afghanistan on the 
floor of a 'film studio' so as to hoodwink a drugged and captured 
'terrorist' into talking. This tacit admission of the practice by 
intelligence agencies of 'staging' incidents relating to 'terrorism' as 
a measure necessary in order to combat terrorists is almost like a 
sudden revelation of the 'repressed' narrative of how intelligence 
agencies actually create the realities that we think they are 
combatting. One might recall also the climactic revelation in the Sanjay 
Dutt-Jackie Shroff-Hrithik Roshan starrer 'Mission Kashmir' (with its 
own oblique references to the enigmatic figure of 'Ghazi Baba') of how a 
'video simulation' of 'terrorists in Indian army uniforms' (found during 
the course of a raid by Indian military personnel dressed as 
'terrorists' on a 'terrorist hideout' ) blowing up a Muslim holy shrine 
in Srinagar in Kashmir is yet another instance of the way in which the 
'production of images' is seen as key to the 'production of terror'. The 
deliberate confusion in the appearance of combatants in and out of 
uniform, of masked men who appear in the middle of the night and wreck 
devastating violence, in the pursuit of an 'image', who could be, 
'militants' or 'soldiers' or 'both' is a reflection of the shadowy 
realities that have overtaken Jammu and Kashmir. Here, as we observed 
earlier, we know who is who, even though the 'terrorist' - 'stands out' 
and 'blends in' at the same time. It is as if the apparatus of illusion 
that is the cinema had taught many lessons to the secondary art of the 
moving image of statecraft, at least in its 'terror/counter-terror' avatar.

Seen in the light of the extraordinary 'entente cordiale' between 
security and intelligence agencies and the image producing agencies of 
the media in India, the film '16 December' becomes an interesting if 
unwitting source for the making of an oblique comment on the reality of 
'13 December'.

In a similar, though perhaps more conscious vein, the film 'Khaki' 
(starring Amibtabh Bacchan, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgun, Arshad Warsi and 
Aishwarya Rai) actually invoked the figure of a 'rogue security agent' 
acting to protect what he thinks are the interests of the nation state, 
by seeking to eliminate what we are at first led to believe is a 
'suspected terrorist mastermind' - a Dr. Ansari, whose appearance, 
demeanour and dignified silence, particularly in the first half of the 
film, cannot but fail to bring to mind what we know of SAR Geelani. 
Ansari is later revealed to be someone who knows 'vital information' 
about the engineering of a communal riot by corrupt politicians (shades 
of 'Gujarat 2002 here) and his silence is an effort to protect what he 
knows so that he can reveal it at the most appropriate moment. Although 
the film follows the formula of good cops versus 'rogue' cops (not 
exactly 'bad' cops, but cops used by shadowy forces within the state 
beyond their control) it again points out the macabrely pantomimic 
character of 'war against terror'.

What do 'Dil Se', 'Mission Kashmir', '16 December' on the one hand, and 
the Zee TV docu-dramas add up to? They add up to the metaphorical 
identikit photograph of the terrorist in our heads whom we can recognize 
when we look at almost anyone's face, regardless of whether they 'stand 
out', or 'blend in'. This is the terrorist writ large as 'everyman' so 
much so that Zee TV can use the footage from the 're-enacted' scenes of 
the 13 December film even in another programme, an 'Inside Story' 
special broadcast barely on 'the Al Qaeda Terror Manual' on the evening 
of the 24th of July, in the wake of the London bombings of the 7th of 
July and barely days before the final Supreme Court verdict on the 13 
December case on the 4th of August. This programme, which can be seen as 
a sort of do-it-yourself 'how to become a terrorist even if you never 
thought of becoming one', with details of how to obtain and mix 
chemicals to make bombs, the details of poisoning drinking water 
systems, how to form cells and conduct communications using codes, etc 
(in a classic example of the 'system' actually egging people on to 
become the 'terrorists' that it can then frighten the rest of us with) 
again used the same scenes of the actors playing Geelani, Shaukat, Afzal 
and the five dead men. Though this time it did not name them. But anyone 
who had seen the earlier '13 December' film would immediately recognize 
once again the fictionalized SAR Geelani hectoring his cell comrades in 
the sequence on 'organization of terrorist cells'. Just as anyone who 
had seen the '13 December' film would have seen the gratuitous and 
grainy images of 'terrorists' training under pine trees and of a 
televised 'encounter' with the late and larger than life 'Ghazi Baba' 
caressing a strangely shaped 'Scorpion' pistol in what was marked 'file 
footage' Like a nightmare or a bad b movie that condemns its audience to 
constant re-runs, the 'images' of the Zee News-Delhi Police Special Cell 
Co Production collaborative genre of 'terrorism' refuses to give up its 
ghost. It returns to haunt our television screens, back to back with 
'Crime Reporter' and a host of other sensational programmes that can 
only be described as a sad case of police-porn-snuff movies on late 
night but prime time television.

It returned to our screens momentarily when Geelani was shot by an 
unidentified gunman in Delhi on the 9th of February, 2005. When earnest 
reporters, and television news anchors, across channels, for several 
days following the incident, instead of asking why the police were 
constantly shadowing Geelani, his brother, his friends, asked why his 
advocate had thought it wise to save his life by taking him immediately 
to hospital, and not wait for him to succumb to his injuries as she went 
through the process of filing, first and foremost, a 'proper FIR (first 
information report) as per procedure, with the Delhi police'

The night of 4thAugust, 2005 (yesterday) was occasion for broadcasts on 
the final supreme court judgement on the 13 December case. These 
broadcasts, produced once again the latest (and perhaps last) episode in 
this continuing 'b' series TV show. Zee News produced yet another 
'special' dovetailed into its prime time news show at 9 PM. This time it 
was titled - '13 December : Ek Saazish'. The news report had shown a 
high ranking Delhi police special cell officer Ashok Chand (in a split 
screen with the first ever viewing of surveillance camera footage from 
the Parliament on 13 December) offer an explanation of the splendid 
conduct of the Delhi Police in the case, after all, Afzal had been 
convicted as a result of the investigation. The others could not be 
convicted, because, as the reporter explained to the anchor in the 
studio, the terrorists had used high technology - mobile phones and 
laptops. And what this implied was that we need better and stricter laws 
to deal with such high tech terrorists, so that no one would be able to 
get away. There is some irony in the fact that the 'very high 
techonology' which had helped the police write their charge sheets in 
the first instance, was now being blamed for their inability to fix the 
blame on say, a Geelani, on whom, the report continued to assert, the 
'needle of suspicion' stayed firm and unwavering, though somewhat 
unsubstantially. So, mobile phones help catch 'terrorists', mobile 
phones are also so high tech that they can be used by those 'terrorists' 
and their advocates to subvert the commendable work done by hard working 
police officers. Therefore bring back laws, or make new laws that can 
make the task of using evidence from mobile phones and other high tech 
devices 'easier' for the prosecution. In other words, bring back or make 
laws that enable phone tapping and surveillance on a generalized scale, 
that facilitate the faulty transcription and translation of tapped 
conversations, that enable the manipulation or obfuscation of phone 
records,and that do not have to produce the taped evidence in court in 
order to obtain a necessary conviction, and that enable the airing and 
unofficial pre-censoring of 'interviews' of the accused in detention in 
the media while a trial is in process, so that television network news 
executives can have an easier nights sleep and count their takings.

In a remarkable admission, and in passing, while playing once again the 
'dramatization' of Afzal's indoctrination (once again from the '13 
December' film) the Zee News broadcast commentator said in passing what 
was to the effect - 'Afzal was a surrendered militant, he had worked off 
and on for the STF for seven years, and he had met Tariq in an STF camp 
in Dral'. Why was this piece of information which had been available in 
the court records, like everything else in this case, since the 21st of 
September, 2002, not made public knowledge either in the previous Zee 
News programmes, or in any programmes thereafter to inform the public. 
Any reasonable person would surmise that a person who has been in 
regular contact with intelligence operatives of the Indian state, who 
has been harrassed by them, who has had money extorted by them (as per 
his wife's statement made to a newspaper) must also be asked what 
relationships these operatives had to the sequence of events leading up 
to 13 December. If one needle of suspicion points at 'militants' and 
their handlers, whether local or across the border, then, clearly, 
another 'needle of suspicion' (which looks stronger, at least, 
circumstantially) also points to the activities and personnel of the 
shadowy agency or cluster of agencies called the 'Special Task Force'. 
Until these details are investigated, we cannot come to any certain 
conclusion about who Afzal is, what role he played, and why he has to die.

Why also, were the surveillance camera footage of the vehicle seen 
proceeding towards the parliament building about as far as the 'Red 
Cross Road-Sansad Marg' roundabout not ever made public before? Was it 
because the channel had to 'wait' until the case was satisfactorily 
'closed'. Surely any journalist or television producer would know that 
the vicinity of the parliament and other sensitive government buildings 
have been photographed on CCTV cameras for a long time. Surely an 
analysis of the movement of the car, as seen in this footage would be 
able to tell us something about how the car was approached, which 
barriers it crossed and how. Could it be that the white ambassador car 
we see in the surveillance footage had prior clearance to approach the 
parliament, at least till a sufficient distance, before all hell could 
break loose. Could it be, that those watching the white car approach, 
were watching, and waiting.

In the end, more questions than ever, remain un-answered. About the 
conduct of the intelligence and security agenices, about the conduct of 
the media and about our gullibility as citizens to be quick to condemn, 
first SAR Geelani, and now Mohammad Afzal. Questions remain about the 
fact that news channels and papers can see it fit never to apologize 
either to SAR Geelani and Afshan Guru for the deliberate distortions of 
the truth that these organs of the media were party to, throughout the 
course of the trials. Not once, did Zee News or any other news channel 
offer an apology to any of the accused, or to the public for the 
emotional stress that their broadcasts may have caused, even as they 
continued to highlight the 'plight' of the families of the 'martyred' 
security and other personnel who fell in the line of duty on December 
13, 2001. Even in the telecast of the 4th of August, 2005, Zee News 
considered it necessary to provoke the family members of one of the 
'martyred' security personnel into an outburst demanding death for all 
the accused. It did not however deem it necessary to reflect on the fact 
that the families of SAR Geelani, Afshan Guru, Shaukat Husain or 
Mohammad Afzal too had had to suffer, first knowing that their loved 
ones were in prison, that they were brutally tortured, and that they had 
to go through the trauma of hearing that they had been awarded death 
sentences. Not once did any news channel ever apologize for creating and 
sustaining the climate of suspicion against people who were ultimately 
acquitted, they did not see it necessary to issue a single note of 
regret to their viewers for having failed to live up to their stated 
claims of providing free, fair, fearless and objective reportage. The 
events of 13 December and their aftermath, along with the sad episode of 
the Kargil War, are probably the nadir as far as a deviation from media 
ethics and professional standards are concerned for a vast swathe of the 
'free and independent media' in India.

In the end, the truth, or the truths (there may be many and conflicting 
truths) may yet turn out to be more complex and disturbing than either 
Zee News or the Supreme Court of India can permit themselves to imagine 
or ask. Zee News, or 'any other alphabet News' is not asking, at least 
not yet, any of those slightly difficult questions. And if the Supreme 
Court of India is to have its way, Afzal is going to hang some day. Some 
of the answers will die with him. SAR Geelani remains alive, and we hope 
he lives long, but as he has himself said, - let us not celebrate the 
acquital of the innocent, let us instead pause to reflect on where we 
are and how we got here. Geelani has reminded us that his fate is not 
special, that there are many in his generation, in Kashmir and elsewhere 
who have had to go through things that are as bad, or worse. And few 
have had his good fortune, to come out of it alive and sane. For their 
sake, and so that Geelani's quiet and dignified fight for justice for 
those still in prison, or are facing the gallows, or have 'disappeared', 
or have turned up with bullets in their heads, we must all continue to 
ask some very hard questions, for a very long time. It is possible that 
the mainstream media will be a weapon in the process of silencing such 
questions. It is also possible that professionals in the mainstream 
media will become more aware and sensitive to the ethical and 
professional demands associated with their practice, and will 
occasionally refuse to toe the lines dictated in smoke filled back rooms 
where channel executives, editors, senior correspondents and 
intelligence agents gather for quiet chats. We hope for the latter, the 
demands of justice, and freedom in South Asia will depend on such acts 
of refusal to 'spin' stories out of blood and smoke.

August 5, 2005
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES and ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have relied extensively on the information (court records, deposition 
etc) and analysis undertaken, collected and collated in 'December 13 : 
Terror over Democracy' by Nirmalangshu Mukherjee, 2005, published by 
Promilla and Co. Publishers, in association with Bibliophile South Asia, 
New Delhi and Chicago. I acknowledge my gratitude for the scholarly 
diligence and care with which Nirmalangshu Mukherjee unravels the 
December 13 case. I have also relied on the report of the meeting to 
discuss the media trial of SAR Geelani held at Sarai CSDS in. I would 
also like to acknowledge conversations that I have had with Nandita 
Haksar and Vrinda Grover while thinking about the background to the 13 
December case.

For more information on the 13 December Case please see the website of 
the All India Defence Committee for SAR Geelani

Also see

Nandita Haksar's article in Sarai Reader 04
Tripta Wahi's article in Sarai Reader 05
and, an earlier posting by me on the Reader List : The Worst is Always 
Precise,
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2002-December/002080.html
which has links to several newspaper reports relevant to the 13 December 
case

The films I watched while thinking about this text were
'Dil Se' (Director : Mani Ratnam, 1998), 'Mission Kashmir' (Director : 
Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2002), '16 December' (Director, Mani Shankar, 2002) 
, 'Khaki' ( Director : Raj Kumar Santoshi, 2003) and the Zee News 
Telefilm on 13 December, as well as the Zee News 'Inside Story' on the 
Al-Qaeda Terror Manual, broadcast on 24th July, 2005, and the News at 9 
and Special Programme at 9:30 : '13 December Ek Saazish' also broadcast 
on Zee News on the evening of July 4, 2005.

I also watched several news broadcasts on Aaj Tak, NDTV, Rashtriya 
Sahara and Zee News, through the course of the successive trials in the 
special POTA court, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court.

Readers interested in the murky history of the invovlement of European 
State intelligence agencies under the ambit of 'Operation Gladio' to 
'create' incidents of terrorism and sustain a 'strategy of tension' 
particularly in Italy are advised to refer to 'Fascism and the 
Establishment : Italy and the Strategy of Tension' 
http://struggle.ws/freeearth/fe3_italy.html. Google searches 
incorporating the words 'Gladio, P2, Italy, Belgium' are also likely to 
yield interesting results.

An equally interesting though less candid account of the work of 
intelligence agencies in India, particularly the IB, by a former 
intelligence operative, can be found in 'Open Secrets: India’s 
Intelligence Unveiled' By Maloy Krishna Dhar, Manas Publication, Delhi, 2005



















-- 
Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Raqs Media Collective)
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India
Phone : + 91 11 23960040
Fax :     + 91 11 23943450
E Mail : shuddha at sarai.net
http://www.sarai.net
http://www.raqsmediacollective.net